relationships

So you got the girl – good going! Seriously, it’s not easy to land a relationship with a Push Girl so lean back, enjoy the rarified air and congratulate yourself… oh, wait. What are you doing? No. Nonono… don’t do that. Don’t you know this by now? Those crazy personal peccadillos, those things your mother told you were so cute, so adorable… Well, frankly my friend, to many of us (not just Push Girls), they are dealbreakers.

So, you charmed your way in, and now you got a date with your dream Push Girl. Good for you, Stan! And don’t worry, we’re going to help you out here too by guiding you into what to do and more importantly what not to do. But this time, instead of telling you, we’ll just show you as, well, who doesn’t love a good dating story?

So you made it past the gate and got yourself a date – good for you! Now, to quote my spirit animal RuPaul: Don’t Fuck It Up!

The Push Girl Rules
No, we’re not talking about that silly book which told women everywhere how to act like a lobotomized, manipulative ninny in order to score a husband. We’re talking about the Push Girls Rules, which will teach you how to score a fun, fabulous dude without putting up with any crap!

Don’t get freaked out by the title of this chapter – it’s not everyday that Christina Aguilera and a pre-wigged out Amanda Bynes can be referenced at the same time! But seriously, with the exception of Auti, who is married to the perfectly be-dimpled Eric, our girls are all looking for that special someone who will knock their wheels off.

And you don’t have to be a Calvin Klein model to catch their eye. Grab your chemistry set, put some Aretha Franklin on and have some R-E-S-P-E-C-T.

A Push Girl is in demand everywhere, be it in the club, at a bar, during a pool party, at work, at a dinner, or in the aisles of the grocery store – but they do like to go out at night with an eye for the hotties. But when a Push Girl rolls in, you need to be ready because, trust me, there’s always a line to get an audience with our girls. They’re in control – and if you can’t give her what she needs, she can always get it herself…

Ladies and gentlemen, stop chewing your nails to the quick and turn on your boob tubes – what you’ve been waiting for for months has finally arrived: the second season of Push Girls is back and holy hell, Batgirl, is it a doozy! This season our heroines are hotter than ever as they roll on the sexy side of life: making out, making up and well, you’ll have to watch to see the rest.

This week on PUSH GIRLS, “Freaky Deaky” showed us some hazards of dating while you’re a wheelchair user, while still letting us see the girls having fun. As Auti, whom I’ve come to think of as the mother hen, reminded us, there’s an element of danger involved in going on a date when you have paralysis, because it involves a deep level of trust very early in your relationship. Tiphany related a scary story about being tipped out of her chair, underscoring the vulnerability wheelchair users experience in intimate relationships.

When is an item a significant object worth collecting or displaying on the mantlepiece — or saving to sell on eBay at a later date — and when is it clutter? And if it’s clutter, is it threatening your relationship? The subject of household clutter has been on our minds lately. Em was at a reading last week for the forthcoming book Significant Objects, a literary experiment that began its life on eBay. Basically, the editors (New York Times Magazine writer Rob Walker and Em’s old friend Josh Glenn of HiLoBrow.com) wanted to see if attaching a fictional backstory to a tchotchke would increase its value (turns out it did). We’ll write more on the book itself when it comes out next month.

Lots of relationship drama on PUSH GIRLS this week, from Angela and Dustin having a serious conversation about the direction of their relationship to Mia and Tiphany going on a speed dating adventure. All the girls are at different phases, relationshipwise; I love watching Auti and Erik’s incredibly strong, loving marriage as much as I enjoy seeing Tiphany explore the relationship world because she’s still searching for what, and who, she wants.

Ever feel like you could benefit from a therapist but you don’t have the cash or you can’t travel to sessions or you just don’t wan to make the commitment? Now the magic Internet is bringing the therapists to you for only $9.99 per hour-long sesh. Talktala:_ is a brand new site (so new they’re still in the beta stage) that democratizes therapy by providing it in small groups for a low price.

Tonight’s episode was called Everyone Stares. And that’s a fact. Get ready to see a whole lot of sexy on PUSH GIRLS, because the premiere episode was only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to frank talk on dating and relationships for women thinking about issues like finding life partners and choosing whether to have children (btw, sponsor a lady’s uterus, why don’t you). One of the things I loved about the first episode was the unabashed exploration of sexuality for wheelchair users, since it’s such a taboo topic, something we’re not supposed to talk about; everyone assumes wheelchair users can’t or don’t have sex.

It seems like just yesterday the two of us were out on the fire escape of the Nerve.com office, smoking (smoking!) and coming up with the profile questions for the original Nerve Personals (you may remember “______ is sexy; ______ is sexier”). The Nerve Personals had a meteoric rise, signing up affiliate partners like Salon and The Onion left and right. It was so successful, it spun itself off into a purely personals company called Spring Street Networks. But what goes up must come down: the personals network was eventually sold to Friend Finder long after we’d gone and the whole thing just seemed to fizzle out, at least on Nerve’s end.

One of my closest friends proposed to his girlfriend over the weekend. He did it neatly and simply. There was a time when a guy was ready to propose to his future wife, it was relatively simple for most: a walk somewhere or maybe at the restaurant of their first date, drop to your knee like Tim Tebow and bust out the ring. But nowadays, thanks to the Internet, some of the more creative fellas out there with their elaborate videos are starting to set people’s expectations of the proposal, to paraphrase Jimmy McMillan, too damn high!

The GWLBWLB objective is to have fun.
Symbiotic relationships have proven successful in the ongoing battle against natural selection. Take, for instance, the Clown Fish and Sea Anemone or the Homosexual Male and his Best Girlfriend. Both bonds persevere thanks to a certain chemistry. For gay men and straight women it may have something to do with their mutual attraction to men (sometimes the same one), but perhaps it’s deeper, as if nature, or some ‘Intelligent Designer,’ thought to create an ideal way for the sexes to coexist.

Croatian artists Olinka Vištica and Dražen Grubišić developed “Museum of Broken Relationships,” a touring exhibition of artifacts from past relationships. It emerged out of their own relationship of four years, after which the break-up inspired this museum, as Vištica explains in an interview with NPR. “When we were deciding to split up, every time people do that it’s connected with something ugly, something awkward, so we didn’t like that way of dealing with our own past, which was once really beautiful. We got this idea, maybe it would be a great idea to have a museum where you could store your emotional heritage.”

We noticed something called THE ORGASM DIARIES is playing on The Sundance Channel this Saturday at midnight. Sounds like a documentary, right? Turns out it’s a British indie film from last year about a couple who’s private naughty photographs become pornographic art-world hits, which turns their relationship upside down. Knowing that, the title becomes a bit more dubious. But Indiewire said it “captures the essence of young love.” It gets a 50-50 rating on Rotten Tomatoes, which sounds a lot less damning when you realize that’s only out of 8 reviews. Could be a fine late-night alternative to Skinemax…?

Our photographer friend David Jacobs (he took our deceptively flattering bio pic) was hired by Human Rights Campaign, a gay rights organization, to document New York’s first day of legal gay marriage this past Monday at Manhattan’s City Hall. HRC will soon have more on their site, but for now here’s a round-up of the day’s events by their National Field Director, Marty Rouse. And below is our friend Dave’s take on events (he’s not gay, but he’s married and does rock the occasional pink shirt with flare), followed by more of his cool photos of the happy couples.

Freud, Schmroid. If you’re looking for a good book on the interpretation of dreams, check out the brand new one by our friend Lauri Loewenberg, the nicest dream interpreter you’ll ever meet! Dream On It: Unlock Your Dreams, Change Your Life (published by St. Martin’s Press) features hundreds of real dream interpretations and a comprehensive dream symbol dictionary to help you understand and make the most of your nocturnal visions, especially the sexy ones. There’s an entire chapter dedicated to sex dreams, which Lauri says are often “not about a physical union you want, but rather a psychological union you need!” There are 10 kinds of sex dreams; below are 5 of them; check out Dream On It for the other five archetypes (The Friend, The Same Gender, Oral Sex, Family Members, and Masturbation):

The Mystery Lover — This is the most common of all sex dreams. Many of us wonder if this dream is actually a glimpse of our soul mate who might be out there somewhere waiting for us. Alas, t’is not so. But what is so is that the unknown, faceless man or woman that often appears in our dreams does indeed hold significance….Our dreams have a cool way of showing us the different parts of our personality in the form of a person so we can gain a deeper understanding of ourselves and what makes us tick. That being said, the mystery lover in your dreams is the embodiment, the personification of the qualities we tend to associate with that gender….Throughout life we struggle to incorporate the right balance of each [gender] into our personalities and behavior. A man wants to be caring and understanding, yet he doesn’t want to be a sissy. A woman wants to assert herself, yet she doesn’t want to be labeled the B word! Our mystery lover dreams are guiding us towards that perfect balance of firm and gentle, bold and caring, yin and yang.

Girlfriend & boyfriend Alex Holder and Ross Neil are both artists and creatives in advertising. Last year, they launched their online picture book about relationships, LoveYouBut.com. It focuses on “the moment in a relationship when you realise you don’t love someone completely, because there is one little thing that keeps bothering you. When it bothers you so much it actually makes you cringe, you know it’s time to say ‘I love you but…’” There are 59 portraits (drawn by Neil) of people who are the targets of various “I love you but” lines, like “I love you but you can’t say I love you back” or “I love you but you put ketchup on everything.” On her calling card site, Holder says LoveYouBut.com has been read all over the world and is inexplicably big in Brazil. We wanted to know more, so we asked:

Our friends, Em & Nora (who we like to call “Em & No”), recently launched a site for grown-ups about young adult literature called LoveYALit.com*, since (according to the New York Times) more and more people 18-and-over are enjoying books originally intended for the 18-and-under set. Of course, books about teens, the most hormonal among us, often deal with issues of first romantic relationships and sexual awakenings — and reading them as adults can emotionally transport us back to our own teenage years, when those things were really new and exciting, dramatic and traumatic. So we asked Em & Nora to give us a sampling of the good, the bad and the complicated of YA love and sex. We published the good and the bad earlier, here’s the complicated:

Our friends, Em & Nora (who we like to call “Em & No”), recently launched a site for grown-ups about young adult literature called LoveYALit.com*, since (according to the New York Times) more and more people 18-and-over are enjoying books originally intended for the 18-and-under set. Of course, books about teens, the most hormonal among us, often deal with issues of first romantic relationships and sexual awakenings — and reading them as adults can emotionally transport us back to our own teenage years, when those things were really new and exciting, dramatic and traumatic. So we asked Em & Nora to give us a sampling of the good, the bad and the complicated of YA love and sex. First, the good (then tune in over the next two Thursdays for the bad and the complicated):

THE GOOD:

Proponents of abstinence-only education may not approve, but there are several literary examples of young adults having empowering, exciting, safe sex as well as healthy, loving relationships with their bodies and their partners.

Forever… by Judy Blume (1975) — The Blume classic of a girl who discovers her sexuality and — get this — finds it pleasurable! Afterwards, there are no disturbing or negative consequences; she’s not punished in any way. She simply comes to the mature realization that high school relationships aren’t forever. Amazingly (and unfortunately), there is nothing else like this in YA lit.

According to Franklin Veaux’s personal website, he is an atheist/transhumanist/computer hacker/BDSM switch who owns a small graphic design and training firm and is into Apple computers, World of Warcraft, tattoos, piercing, photography and polyamory. He’s the guy who did that awesome Map of Human Sexuality a while back. And now he’s done the official Map…

Before we started writing about sex, we had no idea that so many scientists and researchers spent time so much time studying our sexual proclivities. These days we have trouble thinking of anything sexual that hasn’t been qualified and quantified and written up in a science journal.

We both went to high school in New Jersey (just a few towns away from each other, it turns out). During those late 80s days, Lo fell in love and had sex within a loving, committed, romantic relationship. Meanwhile, Em remained a virgin and sometimes ate her lunch in the bathroom. We both ended up excelling in high school, engaging in many extra-curricular activities, and going to well-respected universities.

How did we manage to miss this totally awesome quote from Ryan Gosling? In an interview with New York magazine about his upcoming movie BLUE VALENTINE (opening later this year, it’s a portrait of a marriage, co-starring Michelle Williams), he’s asked about his character’s tattoo of Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree on his arm, and replies: “That book is so fucked up; that story’s the worst. I mean, at the end the tree is a stump and the old guy just sitting on him — he’s just used him to death, and you’re supposed to want to be the tree? Fuck you. You be the tree. I don’t want to be the tree.” Now we can’t decide which we love more — Silverstein’s book or Gosling’s quote about it.